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2 recent studies sequence DNA from the earliest Homo sapiens in Eurasia - Ars Technica

2 recent studies sequence DNA from the earliest Homo sapiens in Eurasia - Ars Technica

2 recent studies sequence DNA from the earliest Homo sapiens in Eurasia - Ars Technica
Apr 09, 2021 2 mins, 22 secs

DNA from the earliest Homo sapiens in Europe adds more detail to the story of our species’ expansion into Eurasia—and our complicated 5,000-year relationship with Neanderthals.

The earliest traces of our species in Eurasia are a lower molar and a few fragments of bone from Bacho Kiro Cave in Bulgaria, dating to between 46,000 and 42,000 years old.

The results suggest that the early waves of Homo sapiens in Eurasia included several genetically distinct groups, only some of which eventually passed their genes on to modern people.

When Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology geneticist Mateja Hajdinjak and her colleagues sequenced DNA from the Homo sapiens bones at Bacho Kiro Cave in Bulgaria, one lower molar and a small scrap of bone were all that remained of a man who died at the site around 45,900 years ago.

His genome contained fragments of the Neanderthal versions of some genes, which had been split up and rearranged in a way that suggested they’d been passed down through about six generations.

Two other pieces of bone at Bacho Kiro Cave were the sole remains of two men who died around 45,000 to 42,000 years ago, and both of them had Neanderthal ancestors seven generations back.

If Neanderthals and Homo sapiens were really having sex—and offspring—that often, it may sound like modern people with European and Asian ancestry should be carrying around a lot more Neanderthal DNA.

Within just a few generations, the three men from Bacho Kiro Cave only had between 3.0 and 3.8 percent Neanderthal DNA.

In modern people, Neanderthal DNA is scattered throughout the genome, but Neanderthal versions of genes are more common in some parts of the genome than others.

In other words, the Homo sapiens versions of certain genes offered such an evolutionary advantage that they had already out-competed the Neanderthal versions within just a few generations.

In fact, a younger bone fragment from Bacho Kiro dating to around 35,000 years ago came from a person who had just 1.9 percent Neanderthal DNA, similar to the levels seen in most modern non-African people.

On the other hand, the earliest known Homo sapiens remains in Europe, at Bacho Kiro Cave, belonged to a group that shared noticeably more alleles with modern people in eastern and central Asia than with the people now living in Bulgaria (or anywhere else in Europe or western Asia).

That "provides evidence that there was at least some continuity between the earliest modern humans in Europe and later people in Eurasia," as Hajdinjak and her colleagues put it, but it's also clear that several of the first Homo sapiens groups to reach Europe eventually faded away without leaving much of a genetic mark.

The tooth and bone fragments at Bacho Kiro Cave were found buried in a layer of sediment that also contained the remains of a culture known to archaeologists as the Initial Upper Paleolithic.

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